Graylog, headquartered in Houston, offers their eponymous platform for centralized log management that helps users find meaning in data faster so as to take action immediately. Graylog is available via Enterprise and Cloud plans, but also has a Small Business Plan, and an Open (free) plan with limited features.
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IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA
Score 8.4 out of 10
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IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA is a fully centralized log management solution.
For small companies, Graylog is the best solution possible. It's easy to configure and "just works." Above everything else, it's free. The only thing I hold against it is the fact that it's Linux-based. [This] makes sense because Elasticsearch is Linux-based. But Linux adds a layer of complexity that we don't need for something basic as a logging server. I'm pretty sure that we would have had a logging server years earlier if I had to convince quite a few decision-making people to go ahead with it anyway.
IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA is well suited if you are using other IBM cloud product ecosystems. It's very mature and supports HIPAA-compliant configurations if you need to store PI/PHI data. We particularly use it for audit requirements but understand the limitation with the retention period is for 30 days only. Also you need to configure if your IBM cloud service doesn't have any log collection or report tool. Log collection agents are widely supported for most of infrastructure in cloud.
Graylog does a great job of its core function: log aggregation, retention, and searching.
Graylog has a very flexible configuration. The backend for storage is Elasticsearch and MongoDB is used to store the configuration. You have to option to make your configuration as simple as possible by storing everything on one box, or you can scale everything out horizontally by using a cluster of Elasticsearch nodes and MongoDB servers with several Graylog servers pointed to all the necessary nodes.
Graylog does a good job of abstracting away a fair portion of Elasticsearch index management (sharding, creation, deletion, rotation, etc).
Community support does not give simple straightforward answers; simply search up Graylog Issues and look at some of the responses on the forums. The documentation is your only hope if you are on the free version, as you can NOT purchase only support. The few times I have worked with Graylog Enterprise support they were great though.
In terms of log aggregation, the free product fully stacks up with the competitors listed. Full control over the data ingests for flexible configuration. Graylog even better on that front than AlienVault USM because you cannot configure the variable mapping. We haven't used the threat exchange stuff or correlation. But with regex searches, we have created function dashboards that show threat theater pictures of our network based on logs from our firewall.
If you use other IBM product ecosystems, IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA is the obvious choice, as it supports seamless integration and better access control with IBM cloud access group setups. IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA was flexible and has wide support for various infrastructure implementations and is also controlled by the same IAM access setup. It can be configured for any IBM cloud services or platform logs or for infrastructure by installing the agent.
Graylog is just less expensive than some other options which meant it fit into our budget otherwise we might not be able to justify a higher cost.
Being able to track issues that we normally couldn't track using other tools is a bonus to help us know of any issues we have and can fix before an outage or failure that could potentially cost money.
We have had to spend more time than I would like to understand and customize Graylog which has taken time away from other tasks and projects.
Most of IBM cloud services support easier integration for log analysis.
We are able to achieve compliance with various audit log reports, which improves governance and control over various cloud resources we have.
Also IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA helps in troubleshooting and analysis for application logs in real time. This helps with improved issue resolution timings.
